Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Friday, January 18, 2008 )

The stock market has tumbled 9% this year, and the Fed and the Bush Administration are trying to ward off ruin with new economic stimulation initiatives.

What was the progression of events that brought the economy down?

–*First, middle and low-income people decided to buy houses, not realizing that they were not good enough people to own houses.

–*When they went looking for money to borrow for those houses, they found willing help from lenders who didn’t care if you had bad teeth, a shitty car, a tattoo, eight illegitimate children, 10 credit cards, a smack habit, three plasma TVs, a hooker in Reno who still thinks you’re going to marry her … and most important, they didn’t care if you had never paid your bills in your life. If you were lucky, the mortgage closure process could be finished while you were still on the parking meter.

–*These bad loans were put into little tiny pies, cut up, and then passed around to hundreds of banks with their horrible monetary version of botulism inside.

–*Further spreading the horrible paralytic toxin around, these things fell into mutual funds, hedge funds and big cake-like structured bank loans until nobody knew what kind of shit they were eating.

–*Given all the spotty loans, banks looked at their balance sheets and said, “Hey, there’s no way we have this much money.” And then they began to draw lines through all of the little numbers as they tried to figure out how much money they might actually have. Then they began to fire everybody.

–*Because nobody now knows at this point in 2008 how much it should cost somebody to loan money to somebody else, the banks said, “Fuck it! Let’s not loan money to anybody!”

–*Meanwhile, all the nice people with tattoos and plasma TVs moved out of the new houses they shouldn’t have owned in the first place and moved in with their sisters and their sisters’ husbands. That left a lot of empty houses, which are now being rented as the prices drop like a whore’s knickers on VJ Day.

–*Now that people’s homes have fallen in price, they are now spending less money on discretionary items such as Nintendos, cars, furniture, Vuitton Bags, Miu-Miu sandals and insulin, and saving their money only for important things like chocolate and beer. This slows down manufacturing, increases unemployment and forces people to lose their child-like faith in total uninterrupted lifelong prosperity, security and happiness.

–*…after which time they usually blame the sorry sack of shit who happens to be president.